Who Cares About Wal-Mart?
by Carl Lindskoog
Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business. Metropolitan Books, 2009
Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Harvard University Press, 2009
Many New Yorkers might wonder what use it is to understand a company like Wal-Mart. After all, with no Wal-Marts in the city most of us aren’t Wal-Mart shoppers, and the social and political culture of New York is far different from the one we regularly associate with Wal-Mart. Isn’t Wal-Mart simply a red state thing? Why should anyone not in “Wal-Mart Country” bother trying to understand this phenomenon?
In two important new works, historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Bethany Moreton each seek to answer those questions. To understand the important changes in the United States (and even the world) in the last thirty years we must understand Wal-Mart, they argue. Whether you are interested in political, economic, or cultural history, Lichtenstein and Moreton each make a powerful case for the decisive influence of Wal-Mart.
In The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business, Nelson Lichtenstein offers a comprehensive view of the company, detailing where it came from and how it became the largest retailer and private sector employer in the world. A distinguished labor historian who has also made major contributions to the history of politics and political economy, Lichtenstein goes beyond Wal-Mart’s impact on American labor, politics and the economy. As the title suggests, The Retail Revolution seeks to explain how Wal-Mart, as the “vanguard of the retail revolution,” has overthrown the previously dominant form of global political economy and has ushered in “a new stage in the history of corporate capitalism.”
In each chapter Lichtenstein focuses on a different aspect of Wal-Mart’s history and contemporary story. Telling the story of Wal-Mart’s origins, Lichtenstein places the company’s ascendance at the end of a one-hundred year period in which manufacturers dominated the American economy. Sam Walton, Wal-Mart’s founder and patriarch, grew up in a world where retailers played second fiddle to manufacturers. But by the 1970s — Wal-Mart’s “miracle decade,” in which the company cracked the $1 billion sales mark — manufacturers’ dominance was coming to an end.
In one of the most interesting chapters of this fascinating book, Lichtenstein explains just how Walton was able to raise Wal-Mart to such heights. Through an innovative use of technology to track and distribute products Walton transformed the relationship between merchant and vendor. He created his own distribution centers and network and he pioneered a barcode system to keep track of every piece of merchandise. After 1987 Wal-Mart’s communication was further aided by the world’s largest private, integrated satellite communication network. This was nothing less than a “logistics revolution” Lichtenstein tells us, and it allowed Wal-Mart to put the squeeze on its manufacturers and suppliers, employing this wealth of new data to “leverage their enormous buying power.” This ability to pressure manufacturers and suppliers was one of the major reasons the company could offer such low prices and it remains Wal-Mart’s major advantage in the global marketplace.
Having clearly established the logistical innovations that aided Wal-Mart’s growth, Lichtenstein’s chapter focusing on the role of China comes across brilliantly. Initially attractive to Wal-Mart because of its “stable currency, developed infrastructure, political reliability, and compliant workforce,” China is now crucial to Wal-Mart’s continued success. But Wal-Mart’s innovative methods to pinch producers and suppliers have created a nightmare for workers and labor standards in China. As the author explains, “an excruciating squeeze on all of its [Chinese] suppliers” has produced “a cascade of social pathologies that corrupt and distort every supply chain relationship: between the prime Wal-Mart vendor and its subcontractors, between factory inspectors and factory management, and between the production supervisors and the young female workers who compose the overwhelming bulk of the factory workforce.” So, during high-production season in China’s Guangdong Province, subcontractors producing Wal-Mart goods regularly require “seven-day workweeks and eighteen-hour workdays.” Lichtenstein makes crystal clear the horrifying image of a “vast new universe of sweatshops that fill the production end of the Wal-Mart supply chain.”
Although highly original information is packed into every chapter of The Retail Revolution, more familiar to observers of Wal-Mart will be Lichtenstein’s chapters on the company’s conservative and male-dominated corporate culture, its ties to right-wing political and religious movements, and its unabashed and unwavering attempts to keep out labor unions. Those keeping track of Wal-Mart in the news will also be familiar with the stories Lichtenstein tells of the union and community groups’ challenges to its expansion into Southern California, Chicago, and Maryland.
However, Lichtenstein captivates the reader by placing these well-told stories alongside Wal-Mart’s attempts to expand internationally. According to Lichtenstein, while the company has been enthusiastically embraced in many parts of Latin America and East Asia, Wal-Mart has run into roadblocks “in nations where either politics or a tough regulatory environment robs the company of the capacity to slash labor costs or build a new generation of suburban stores.” In the United Kingdom, for example, Wal-Mart has had considerable trouble while in Germany, where the company failed to grasp the significant differences in political culture, it has experienced “outright failure.”
Lichtenstein concludes The Retail Revolution by asking the reader to consider the future for Wal-Mart and what an opposition movement might be able to yield. Lichtenstein suggests that the decline of the labor movement and Wal-Mart’s hostility to unionism “has reawakened interest in what progressives and New Dealers used to call ‘the labor question.’” “On the agenda” for progressives and labor activists today “is not so much a struggle specifically against Wal-Mart, although that is well under way. In the end, it is Sam’s World, the one in which people are compelled to live under economic and psychological duress, that needs to change.” Lichtenstein predicts “a day of reckoning” for Wal-Mart, at home and abroad.
Bethany Moreton adopts a different approach to Wal-Mart that focuses instead on the region and the people that produced the company. Although To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the company, Moreton aims to do even more. She seeks to reclaim the people of Wal-Mart country from historical and political irrelevancy. Moreton makes a case for placing these people, especially Wal-Mart Moms (the white, rural women who worked and shopped in the early Wal-Mart stores) at the center of the political and economic changes in the last three decades of American history.
In a surprising and interesting argument, Moreton claims that the people of Arkansas, the original Wal-Mart country, held tightly to their 19th century populism, and that this political and cultural legacy actually helped facilitate the rise of Wal-Mart from the populist heartland. This shouldn’t be so surprising, Moreton argues, if we recognize that populists “were not purely hostile to business or bigness.” They proposed farmers’ cooperatives and producer’s monopolies over the farming sector, improved infrastructure, and they favored the idea of “federal resources for a favored segment of the polity, the virtuous farmers.” Thus, Moreton argues, the “fragmented legacy of Populism” facilitated the rise of “the mega-corporations of the Sun Belt.” Demands for the state to underwrite regional development and concern about keeping resources local all “contributed to Wal-Mart’s subsequent success” and “helped the world’s largest company win hearts and minds to the cause of corporate capitalism in the old heartland of anti-corporate agitation.”
Other values that workers and customers from Wal-Mart country brought into the stores were even more decisive. As the author puts it, these people, especially middle-aged mothers, “brought rural, Protestant family ideals into the workplace, changing the face of postindustrial America.” Although authority in Wal-Mart stores was clearly vested in men “as men, not as management,” and all women were therefore subordinate, Moreton maintains that Wal-Mart women still had a good deal of power. They “made their priorities known, and management responded accordingly,” thereby being the source of “the original momentum” for “a new service ethos” which would “grow to an economic gospel.” Through the “relationship between customers and clerks, the people in early Wal-Mart stores taught management how to function in the new economic niche it was creating.” This was the “ethos of service … a new ideological basis for valuing work and for explaining the radical inequalities it produced.”
Moreton intends this argument to be a response to journalists and scholars like Thomas Frank who fail to fully understand what happened in Wal-Mart country. The women and men of Wal-Mart were not duped into placing social and religious concerns before economic needs, nor were they simply exploited workers who were too stupid to realize it. According to Moreton, Wal-Mart shoppers and workers helped shape a company and a workplace that met their needs as well as those of Wal-Mart owners and management. Women workers at Wal-Mart “did not automatically claim the identity of ‘worker’ or, indeed, of ‘woman.’ Their own preference was for a different cultural tradition, that of Christian service,” Moreton claims. So, even though the servant model that Wal-Mart moms helped promote offered management a new claim to authority and even though it solidified patriarchy in the workplace as well as the home, it also offered female service workers a new source of respect and it ensured greater participation by husbands at home. This was, according to Moreton, an acceptable compromise for Wal-Mart women.
In addition, To Serve God and Wal-Mart tells the story of the simultaneous rise of the New Christian Right, ascendancy of free-market ideas, and growth of Wal-Mart as an international corporation. Finding many points of intersection between these three stories, Moreton argues that Wal-Mart country became, through the direct support of Wal-Mart, Inc., the home of Christian free enterprise, a movement that fused religious and economic ideas to evangelize for free market capitalism.
In the early-1970s, the United States was experiencing the political and economic tremors that would cause the New Deal state and New Deal liberalism to collapse. Wal-Mart and the people of Wal-Mart country played an important part in this process, Moreton observes. Contributing to the growing “prestige of the market,” Wal-Mart and the Walton family provided “a highly productive laboratory of free-market faith during the 1970s and 1980s.” By introducing a free market educational campaign among its management as well is in regional Christian colleges, Wal-Mart helped plant the seeds that would grow into the neoliberal “Washington consensus.” Wal-Mart became the main benefactor of conservative Christian colleges like University of the Ozarks, John Brown University and Harding University, giving them key financial support when other sources of funding were hard to come by. In return, regional Christian colleges moved economics courses and business departments to the center of the curriculum, promoting a widespread regional embrace of free market ideas and creating ready avenues for future company management. Housed at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri, Students in Free Enterprise, an extracurricular organization that promoted free enterprise ideas among college students, represented an exceptionally “outstanding laboratory for the elaboration and dissemination” of these ideas. In all these ways, Moreton shows, Wal-Mart country was especially fertile ground for the seeds of Christian free enterprise to take root.
The ideology of Christian free enterprise that grew out the careful collaboration between Wal-Mart and conservative Christian colleges had an important impact on the course of economic globalization, particularly as it would affect Latin America. Moreton demonstrates how this movement tapped into an evangelizing spirit that extended south of the border to Mexico and Central America. Offered Walton Scholarships, Latin American students came to Sun Belt Christian colleges to receive training in the virtues of free market capitalism as well as evangelical Christianity. When they returned to their home countries, these Walton Scholars could be depended upon to help establish international branches or at least spread the gospel of free enterprise.
To Serve God and Wal-Mart is a fascinating and useful work of US cultural and economic history. Moreton adds much to our understanding of the people of Wal-Mart country leaving the reader with a better idea of the complexity of this group. Even as it answers certain questions, however, Moreton’s work raises others. In her attempt to understand the agency of Wal-Mart employees, Moreton eclipses workplace concerns these laborers must have had, and she fails to fully engage with them as workers, an identity that likely persisted even if in a subordinate position alongside the identity of Christian servant and woman. Nelson Lichtenstein acknowledges the widespread devotion to Wal-Mart that many of its workers had, but he also details the many complaints that these same workers put forth. Where is the anger over being forced to do unpaid work or the anxiety that unusual work hours and limited benefits produced in the workforce? Are we to assume that this was completely erased by workers’ devotion to Christian servanthood? Even in the earliest Wal-Mart workers this seems unlikely.
Another set of questions arises around the ideology of Christian free enterprise that occupies such an important part of Moreton’s story. As Moreton explained the formation and influence of Christian free enterprise I frequently found myself wondering what differentiated this sort of ideology from mainstream market fundamentalism. What made it “Christian” free enterprise? Moreton does show how Southwest Baptist University, the home of Students in Free Enterprise, fused Christian and business education and she clearly demonstrates that free market fundamentalists partnered with Christian fundamentalists to build a powerful movement. Still, what is missing is a careful discussion of the exchange between economic ideology and evangelical theology, without which Christian free enterprise is left looking virtually identical to other forms of free market fundamentalism.
These concerns aside, Bethany Moreton has written an extremely interesting book. Alongside Nelson Lichtenstein’s The Retail Revolution, To Serve God and Wal-Mart adds a great deal to our understanding of US history and the contemporary world. These books should put to rest any question about the relevance of Wal-Mart and the significance of political and cultural movements produced in Wal-Mart country.
